Whereas spontaneous point mutation operates on nucleotides individually, sexual recombination manipulates the set of nucleotides within an allele as an essentially particulate unit. In principle, these two different scales of variation enable selection to follow fitness gradients in two different spaces: in nucleotide sequence space and allele sequence space respectively. Epistasis for fitness at these two scales, between nucleotides and between genes, may be qualitatively different and may significantly influence the advantage of mutation-based and recombination-based evolutionary trajectories respectively. We examine scenarios where the genetic sequence within a gene strongly influences the fitness effect of a mutation in that gene, whereas epistatic interactions between sites in different genes are weak or absent. We find that, in cases where beneficial alleles of a gene differ from one another at several nucleotide sites, sexual populations can exhibit enormous benefit compared with asexual populations: not only discovering fit genotypes faster than asexual populations, but also discovering high-fitness genotypes that are effectively not evolvable in asexual populations.
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August 2006
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Conference Article|
July 21 2006
Effects of intra-gene fitness interactions on the benefit of sexual recombination
R.A. Watson;
R.A. Watson
1
*Natural Systems Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton University, Southampton, U.K.
1To whom correspondence should be addressed (email raw@ecs.soton.ac.uk).
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D.M. Weinreich;
D.M. Weinreich
†Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.
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J. Wakeley
J. Wakeley
†Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.
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Publisher: Portland Press Ltd
Received:
April 25 2006
Online ISSN: 1470-8752
Print ISSN: 0300-5127
© 2006 The Biochemical Society
2006
Biochem Soc Trans (2006) 34 (4): 560–561.
Article history
Received:
April 25 2006
Citation
R.A. Watson, D.M. Weinreich, J. Wakeley; Effects of intra-gene fitness interactions on the benefit of sexual recombination. Biochem Soc Trans 1 August 2006; 34 (4): 560–561. doi: https://doi.org/10.1042/BST0340560
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